Art, Sex and Eugenics

Fae Brauer is Research Professor in Visual Theory at the University of East London, Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory at The University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts and author of many book essays and articles on visual cultures. Anthea Callen is Emeritus Professor of Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham and Research Associate at the University of Warwick Institute of Health. She has published extensively on Impressionism and late nineteenth-century culture, her most recent books being The Spectacular Body: Science, Method, and Meaning in the Work of Degas and The Art of Impressionism: Painting Technique and the Making of Modernity.

Prize: Best Edited Book or Anthology for 2008, awarded by the Art Association of Australia and New Zealand (AAANZ) 'This pioneering volume addresses a vitally important topic, and one that is at the cutting edge of research in history of art and visual culture. The geographical range of the contributions, from Soviet Russia to the South Seas, is splendid, and the essays present fascinating visual material that has hitherto remained hidden. This book provides an agenda for future research in the field.' Michael Hatt, University of Warwick, UK 'A winning combination of stylish language and analytic insight, this book reassesses the art of eugenics. Here, artworks are discussed as social propaganda. Images of the perfect eugenic body take center-stage as the authors reveal how beauty and athleticism played a key role in promoting an ethos of wholesome heterosexuality during the early twentieth century in countries as culturally and politically diverse as France, Germany, Russia, New Zealand, America, and Britain. The healthy body was put on display through popular art - and by these subtle means individuals learned to focus their sexual desire on the perfect body, the "corpus delecti" of the subtitle and to disparage other bodies, those bodies steeped in racial prejudice. This compelling study shows how art and sex provided a double-whammy that reinforced racist and eugenic doctrines that once held powerful sway.' Janet Browne, Harvard University, USA

• Contents: Introduction: making eugenic bodies delectable: art, 'biopower' and 'scientia sexualis', Fae Brauer; Improper moves: Maori haka and racial destiny, Roger Blackley; The art of scientific propaganda, Shawn Michelle Smith; Eroticizing Lamarckian eugenics: the body stripped bare during French sexual neoregulation, Fae Brauer; Man or machine: ideals of the labouring male body and the aesthetics of industrial production in early 20th-century Europe, Anthea Callen; 'Desiring skin': eugenics, trauma and acting out of masculinities in British inter-war visual culture, Gabriel Koureas; 'The proper peep': conflicting female ideals under German National Socialism, Lorettann Gascard; Bolshevism and 'sexual revolution: visualising new Soviet woman as the eugenic ideal, Pat Simpson; Future perfect? The elusive 'ideal type', Christina Cogdell; Bibliography; Index.